Why Chinese feminists marched on Washington

Zhang Ling was dressed like a revolutionary from the Spanish civil war. With a long braid emerging from a scarlet beret and clad in trousers a colour she described as “communist red”, Zhang had driven her Honda from her home in upstate New York the night before, inspired rather than frustrated by hours of traffic jams: every passing car, she said, seemed to have been driven by a woman.

“Women occupy the highway now, and the city tomorrow,” she said.

Swallowed in a sea of pink hats, Zhang, a professor of cinema studies at the State University of New York, smiled when she saw American protesters raising banners with the Maoist slogan, “Women hold up half the sky.” But the reference saddened her, too; a flashback to the People’s Republic, where she had grown up, one where rosy-cheeked iron ladies had worked farms and factories alongside male comrades, until China took a turn toward capitalist individualism and away from (sometimes honoured and sometimes ignored) socialist ideas of gender equality.

Zhang was one of several dozen activists in China’s feminist movement who travelled across the country for the Women’s March on Washington to join millions of Americans as they took to the streets protesting Donald Trump, a day after his January 20 inauguration. Trump’s policies look destined to resonate far beyond America’s borders; millions of women’s rights advocates staged their own protests worldwide, in cities from Copenhagen to Riyadh. Mainland China, where protests are often harshly punished, was not among them. For Chinese activists living stateside, that presented an irresistible opportunity.